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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29418864">Doc Scratch Has A Day</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Classpectanon/pseuds/Classpectanon'>Classpectanon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Three Hundred And Sixty Five Ficlets About Homestuck [44]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Homestuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Gen, Slice of Life</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 12:15:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>665</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29418864</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Classpectanon/pseuds/Classpectanon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Did you know there is a man on the moon?</p><p>44/365</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Three Hundred And Sixty Five Ficlets About Homestuck [44]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2085684</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Doc Scratch Has A Day</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Did you know there is a man on the moon? No, he shouldn't be there - the man with a round, cue ball head, nor should his mansion be there, in the white, dusty sands of Earth's moon, but he's there, he exists, and he's real. He's about four foot nine, and he has no place in this story anymore. A transplant from elsewhere, like an organ, but vestigial. Moving an appendix from a corpse of a story into a surrogate with theirs having been removed two weeks ago. Useless chaff without a need anymore in a world that's abandoned him - hell, a world that doesn't even know he exists.</p><p>The good doctor does not conceive of this as "hell", or really as any sort of punishment. It is a form of hell, of course, because it involves a universe where he will live forever and never be relevant to it, where there will be no summoning of his green-skulled master, but hell would require him to be unnerved by this. He obviously is aware of it as factual information, and has made his peace in the instant he was created at the birth of the narrative universe. It may be more likely to call it a form of narrative purgatory.</p><p>Doc Scratch exists. He is a man on the moon.</p><p>He does not spend his day in this stagnant, purposeless, dead-end universe performing frivolities of food or drink. He does not relax in a hammock or climb a tree or try and fail skateboard tricks - if he did try skateboarding at all, he would be awesome at it, because he is on the moon where gravity is much lesser, and because he is Doc Scratch. Nor is there anyone around to tuck him into bed, or lay on his feet, or pat his shiny, bone china pate forehead if he were to snuggle into the bed that he does not own and fall asleep.</p><p>Doc Scratch spends his days playing chess and drafting up little stories on his typewriter. He has been writing approximately 1000 words a day since the beginning of time. This means he has written about 5.037 x 10^15 words since the universe began. This is equivalent to about 100,740,000,000 novels. That's one hundred billion, seven hundred and forty million novels, and all of them are exquisite. You've probably read some, on this website, or elsewhere. He doesn't write the happy novels. He writes novels where bad, interesting things happen to people. Occasionally, he packages them up in twine and snaps his fingers and, if they aren't intercepted by an angry dog first, they appear somewhere on earth, sometimes in a publisher's office, where they get published under one of a million pseudonyms, or sometimes they land on your desk and he lets you take credit for the masterfully composed manuscript.</p><p>As for the chess, well, when you are someone like Doc Scratch, you've really figured out every gambit, every position, already, billions of years in advance, before chess as we knew it was even invented. He fiddles around with the pieces because their motion across the board amuses him. It's not quite tapping away at a typewriter, it's something different. Sometimes, he moves his chess pieces as if he's the AI in that game of chess you're playing, the one that beat you quite effortlessly, that made you get angry and think; "I know they can make an AI that can beat me every single time, so why can't they just let me win?" - that was him, sitting on the moon.</p><p>Doc Scratch sits in a chair on the moon. There are a number of humans down on earth that shouldn't be there. In another world, they might be trolls, or carapacians, or just other humans from the wrong timeline. He sits on a chair, still, unmoving, unbreathing, and then gets back to tapping out every slowly considered word. One at a time, hunting and pecking.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading. All views, kudos, comments, and bookmarks are appreciated.<br/><a href="https://twitter.com/classpectanon">Twitter</a></p></blockquote></div></div>
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